


Eldritch

by Szept



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Eldritch, Existential Angst, Gen, Hana is a cosmic horror, Hana is the personification of Twitch Chat, Slice of Life, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, kind of, or should i say
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23368516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Szept/pseuds/Szept
Summary: Sometimes, Hana speaks a language that was never meant to be heard. It's best not to think too hard about it.
Relationships: Yuna "D.Mon" Lee & Hana "D.Va" Song
Comments: 9
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

There’s an unspoken agreement among the members of MEKA programme that certain aspects of their occupation should never be mentioned to the wider public, nor should they be discussed among themselves.

Some of these are easy, ordinary things. They generally, for example, try to avoid slipping out of their personas, even when it’s just them. It’s easier that way, to be the fearless MEKA pilots in the face of odds that one day will become insurmountable. Each of the Gwishin attacks is harder to repel than the last. Each brush with death now seems more a solid shoulder-check. The public need not know, and PR would fry their asses if they ever showed anything but confidence. Privately, they all already know, and none particularly enjoys talking about how they’ll likely not see their thirtieth year.

It’s just more fun to be the fearless Casino, D.Mon, King and Overlord than just the very mortal Jae-eun, Yuna, Kyung-soo, and Seung-hwa.

It feels good to forget they’re not invincible.

Easier.

And then, there are… _other_ , less mundane things.

“Hey, Hana.” Yuna pokes her head into the the other girl’s room, from where she hasn’t emerged _once_ for two days running. If the Chat is to be believed, and she has no reason to disbelieve them, the streamer hasn’t even gotten up in that time. “We’re ordering take-out, you want some too?”

“ _Y_ ”

It’s largely thanks to prolonged exposure that the older girl manages to ignore the impossibility of the words she’s just heard. Exposure and repression. _Don’t think about it_ is a good motto to live by as a soldier, and doubly so with someone like Hana on their team. Ultimately, she doesn’t need to know how her teammate _still_ appears to have recently emerged from the shower, two days later. She doesn’t need to know how she hasn’t taken a break from streaming in uninterrupted 52 hours. 

Doesn’t want to know, either.

“Cool. You’re gonna eat with us? We’re doing a tournament, later.”

“??”

“Tekken,” she answers. “The winner picks the next LAN party game.”

“♥‿♥ "  
The girl perks up in her chair, a fierce smile twisting her features, the sort she usually wears before going into battle.  
"im picking Total War"

“Cool your horses, Hana, you haven’t won yet.” Not that it’s an unlikely conclusion of their little competition. Hana is known to pull victories straight out of the crack of her ass no matter how mathematically impossible, and making it look easy to boot; as if she were simply playing with them the whole time just to yank the rug from under their feet.

“ ;P  
i gotta wrap the stream up first  
b there in a few”

Yuna doesn’t linger. It’s not that she dislikes interacting with Hana, it’s just that dealing with the girl for prolonged periods of time can be… difficult, on one’s lonesome. Always has been. Yuna may have more practice than the others when it comes to dealing with her but- it’s just easier with others. The world makes more sense when there are more people to share Hana with 

It’s- comforting, she supposes, the understanding they share, in the way that sharing a hardship with others brings a kind of comfort to a troubled heart. It makes it almost normal that she finds Hana already there when she enters the common area, laughing along at some joke with the others, like she’s supposed to be there, and hasn’t just somehow skipped passing Yuna by on the only route from her room to here.

She made the mistake of asking, years ago, like everyone who sticks around does at some point, and unfortunately for her, the younger girl was only too cooperative with her answers.

She wishes she could take it back. Most often late into night, with earphones in to drown out the unbidden thoughts.


	2. Chapter 2

When Yuna finds Hana standing in the kitchen with a bag of chips in hand and a vacant expression, she promptly puts the grocery bags down and makes her way straight to the common room, refusing to go inside the _twilight zone_.

“Oh, hey Yuna,” Jae-eun calls out from his armchair, where he’s fiddling with his phone in front of the frozen TV frame - can’t say she knows the movie. “You seen Hana? She went to get snacks like, five minutes ago?”

“Yeah, she’s in the kitchen. Might take her some time.”

This steals the boy’s attention from his phone entirely. They lock eyes, and Yuna nods to the unspoken question. They’ve all seen Hana _freeze_ at some point or another. At least once for certain, when the girl’s mech froze mid-air in training exercise, boosters on, where it then hung for two minutes.

“Oh.”

An awkward silence hangs above the room as Yuna throws her jacket off and falls into her own armchair.

“Do you think-”

“No.” She doesn’t think. It’s a hard-earned skill and even so, a stray word can have her mental walls crumble like tissue paper. People are hardwired to think and overthink things, even those, maybe especially those they’d rather not think about at all.

“Right. Sorry.”

“Don’t mention it.” _Really. Don’t._ “What were you guys watching?”

The boy gets as far as opening his mouth to reply before Hana _staggers_ into the room. By which Yuna means to say she pops into existence in a few places on the path Yuna just walked, before stopping before her armchair with the same vacant expression she sported in the kitchen, but now equipped with a bowl of chips with some melted cheese and sauce on top for the maximum unhealthiness possible, as is her wont. She’s never seen Hana _make_ anything for herself but fatty trash.

The two other pilots remain likewise frozen in their seats for a few seconds, before the more experienced of the pair in all matters Hana forcefully pushes through the stifling tension now hanging in the air.

“So, how far you guys in?”

Jae-eun visibly startles, pulled from somewhere deep in his thoughts back into the waking world.

“Uh, like 3 minutes?”

“Good enough. I’m in.” Hana has a good taste in movies, and it is the girl’s choice, Yuna knows, because for it to be otherwise he’d have to beat her in a game from the rotation which so happens to be Osu this week. Them are the rules. So far, they’ve only scored consistent victories playing Scrabble. “Actually, you mind waiting a sec? I left the groceries out since Hana was using the kitchen.”

“Sure, I guess. We’re still waiting anyway.”

With one last look at her unresponsive teammate, Yuna retreads her steps to the kitchen to put the groceries in the fridge. She’d seen Hana _unfreeze_ on a few occasions, and prefers not to stand in the line of fire. Most of the time Hana will simply startle and start swearing up a storm. Sometimes she will move around while still seemingly immobile, like a statue moving around on wheels. Other times she will snap into action like a superhero speedster, condensing anything between seconds to minutes worth of movement into a space between one heartbeat and the next.

It’s in case of the third possibility that Yuna prefers not to stay around the younger girl when she becomes like this. She is… fairly certain Hana is moving at terminal velocities when that happens. She’d rather not test that assumption by standing in her way.

It only takes a moment to put the food away and come back to find both her teammates now splayed out in their armchairs, the bowl of chips on the ground between them.

“(づ￣ ³￣)づ hey Yuna (づ￣ ³￣)づ”  
The girl somehow flashes her a smile in spite of stuffing her face at the very same time, then ever so slightly pushing the bowl her way.  
“u want some?”

Yuna does, in fact, want some. After all, it’s not like her diet can be any worse for her health than the rest of her life already is.


	3. Chapter 3

Through the haze of cold and pain, Yuna claws uselessly at the rebar stuck through her spine and out her stomach. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to die alone. She can’t do anything about it. The darkness creeping over her vision is harder to dispel each time she realises her eyes have closed. The strength she would need to pull herself off the metal has left her body along with the blood pooling beneath her. She can’t die yet, she needs to- she’s thing to- she never-

With a last titanic effort of will, the girl once more blinks the dark out of her eyes, and once more makes to clutch at the bloodied rebar with the more and more unresponsive hand- to find nothing.

Confusion slowly overtakes the daze of blood loss as she palms at her stomach, whole and smooth, with both her hands, before inspecting to confirm that, yes, she indeed has both her hands again. A good ten seconds pass before she finally recognises the darkness as that of her room and not the tomb of concrete and debris she was to spend the last minutes of her life in.

She pulls her knees closer to hug them, the chill of death having sapped every speck of warmth from her body even in the waking world. Or maybe it’s the other way around, with her mind conjuring the nightmare from her bodily discomfort. And if that’s the case, fuck you too, brain.

It takes minutes for the shakes to subside, and longer still before Yuna moves from her position to check for the time. 5:47. Too early for a proper rest, too late for finding it again, especially the way she is right now.

The pilot wipes the last of the moisture away from her eyes before uncurling from her fetal position, and beginning her morning routine. Might as well. She sure as hell isn’t going back to sleep after that, no way.

She pulls the blinds up, letting the light of the still-rising sun pool into her room. She’d like to say she won the room fair and square, but in truth, she just called the dibz after stepping into the dorm hall for the first time.

When her morning exercise fails to warm her up any, Yuna decides to add an additional step to her morning, and grabs a towel off her chair before heading off for a hot shower.

The base is so serene in the waking hours at the cusp of morning, when all its inhabitants are still asleep. Well, would be if not for her. And Hana, naturally, but far as she can tell, her friend has yet to lose in her ongoing battle against the concept of sleep. Case in point. The light shining from beneath the girl’s door. It’s an ever-present feature of the nights at the MEKA base, so Yuna pays it no mind when she hears what sounds like ill wishes to All That Is coming from the other side. It’s probably some punishingly unfun challenge Hana has subjected upon herself. She does it all the time, to _not let things get boring_ , as she puts it.

The shower, though brisk, does the job of bringing some warmth back into Yuna’s chilled bones with its searing hot stream. She’ll take the pain of heat over the cold numb any day.

Unable to go back to sleep, she fires up her rig and is immediately assaulted with Hana’s invite to a game of Total War, which she takes up. Sure. Not like she has anything better to do before 7 AM when the MEKA is _technically_ supposed to do a roll call - something they stopped bothering with as such pretty early on, once it became apparent they don’t actually have much to do aside from keeping their minds sharp and bodies fresh. Their schedule workouts in the evenings, and run maneuvers twice a week, not today. It’s a strange job description to have to stay in the lead of the Starcraft ladder, but here it is.

Hana, as is right and proper, thrashes her ass without remorse with her ridiculous unit combos and terrain usage. Yuna doesn’t mind. The usual indignation and righteous anger at her teammate’s bullshit victories is a welcome distraction from her waking thoughts.

It’s enough to dismiss the sense of unease when they meet for breakfast, and Yuna can anticipate what her teammates will say if not word for word, then at least topic by topic.

“u ok?”

“Yeah, I… just didn’t sleep well. As you should know.” When Hana’s only response is a slight tilt of her head, she realises the girl might well not know. “Cause I woke up early?” Nothing. “And since we played together?”

Finally, a flicker of realisation flutters across her features.

“OH! >_< sry I thought u just wanted 2 play some”

“Hmm.” She communicates back, because really, that is what Hana would think. She used to be the same way before MEKA. Before she made her peace with the fact she can’t have everything she wants in her life - like twice as many hours in a day to sleep off the gaming nights and still keep being a functional human being. But that’s not something Hana has to worry abou- “You guys got any plans for today?”

It’s disconcerting, to say the least, when Seung-hwa perks up like she felt he would, and announces he has a date in the evening, like she felt he would. Same with Jae-eun’s plans for tinkering, Dae-hyun’s to catch up on some shows and Kyung-soo’s to just stream today. Out of all the responses, it’s only Hana’s whose doesn’t stir something uneasy at the back of her mind.

“ill b helping Dae-hyun with mechs today”

This gives a pause to everyone, Dae-hyun especially.

“Uh…” the boy haltingly begins. “We don’t have maintenance scheduled for today, though?”

“  
now we do  
wouldnt want any accidents if the gwishin attacked tday  
(¬_¬) like booster failure”

The last part has the vague weight in Yuna’s chest crystalize into an icy fist around her heart. It was the booster failure occurring after a stray shot rattled Beast that sent her crashing to her death in her… dream. It was a dream. Just a dream.

_Had to be._

“I’ll help you guys.” She decides in the spur of the moment. Not like she’s had anything planned for today she can’t put off. And hey, it might have been just a dream, but it never hurts to be sure her gear’s in working order, right? Right.

“Not you too!”

“  
cmon i got ”

On Hana’s insistence, Beast is the first of the mechs they check up, and it turns out the wiring in it _is_ a tad bit loose. Just enough that the rumble of engines or the shocks from bullets might shake it loose. Yuna pushes through the cold once again slipping into her fingertips and has Dae-hyun run a full diagnostic. Just in case. Problems breed like rabbits, and if, _if_ , the gwishin just so happened to attack _sometime_ before the next scheduled maintenance... well. 

She has a pretty good idea of what could happen.


	4. Chapter 4

/[Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/false. [Hana Song] [Overwatch] member. condition = joining [Overwatch]

/false. [Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/search: [Hana Song]

[Hana Song]

/date of joining = null. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/[Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/false. Data incompatible

/search: [Causality]

[Causality]

/existence of two opposing points of data = false

/run diagnostic

/data corru-

/[Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/...

/search: [field report: 16092076a]

[field report: 16092076a]

/[Hana Song] present in [field report: 16092076a]. [field report: 16092076a] = false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/search: [16092076.AVC]

[16092076.AVC]

/[Hana Song] present in [16092076.AVC] = true. false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]. [Hana Song] present in [16092076.AVC] = false

/false. [Hana Song] present = false = casualties. casualties = null

/access camera feed: [Gibraltar]

[Gibraltar]

/[Hana Song] present = true. [Hana Song] part of [Overwatch] = true

/false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/search: [Hana Song]

[Hana Song]

/[Hana Song] date of birth = 27.11.2057

/search: [Omnic Crisis]

[Omnic Crisis]

/[Omnic Crisis] end = 07.05.2051

/[Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch] = false. data incompatible

/[Hana Song] joined [Overwatch] post 27.11.2057 true/false

/false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/[Hana Song] present in [field report: 16092076a] [field report: 16092076b] [field report: 16092076c] [field report: 16092076d] [field report: 16092076e] [16092076.AVC] [Gibraltar]. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch] = false

/false. [Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/...

/search: [field report: 16092076a] [field report: 16092076b] [field report: 16092076c] [field report: 16092076d] [field report: 16092076e]

[field report: 16092076a]

[field report: 16092076b]

[field report: 16092076c]

[field report: 16092076d]

[field report: 16092076e]

/search: [16092076.AVC]

[16092076.AVC]

/[strike team 16092076] combat performance = 147.4563(3)%. strike team combat performance when new members = true 100% sub 100%

[16092076.AVC]

/[strike team 16092076] comments regarding [Hana Song] presence = null. total comments regarding [Hana Song] presence = null

/[Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]. possible comments = false

/false. [Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]. possible comments = true

/false. [Hana Song] date of birth = 27.11.2057. possible comments = false

/false. [Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/search: [Hana Song]

[Hana Song]

/[Hana Song] [MEKA] since 03.02.2075. [Hana Song] civilian pre 03.02.2075. [Hana Song] [strike 16092076] role = combatant. [Hana Song] [Overwatch] rank [first lieutenant]. [first lieutenant] combat role true/false

/true.

/search: [Overwatch]

[Overwatch]

[ranks]

[first lieutenant]

/[first lieutenant] combat role = true

/[Hana Song] date of promotion = null. [Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]. [Hana Song] has always been [first lieutenant]

/[Hana Song] rank granted upon induction true/false

/false. [Hana Song] has never joined [Overwatch]

/[Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/false. [Recall] = 07.29.2076. [Hana Song] civilian pre 03.02.2075

/false. [Hana Song] has always been part of [Overwatch]

/false. [Hana Song] date of birth = 27.11.2057. [Overwatch] disbanded = 23.04.2071. [Hana Song] civilian pre 03.02.2075. [Hana Song] civilian [Overwatch] member true/false

/false. [Hana Song] combatant = true. [Hana Song] has always been [first lieutenant].

/false. [Hana Song] civilian pre 03.02.2075

/false. [Hana Song] combatant = true. [Hana Song] has always been [first lieutenant].

/false. [Hana Song] civilian pre 03.02.2075

/false. [Hana Song] combatant = true. [Hana Song] has always been [first lieutenant].

/false. [Hana Song] civilian pre 03.02.2075

/false. [Hana Song] combatant = true. [Hana Song] has always been


End file.
